Some Kind of Animal

by Maria Romasco-Moore

  “Monsters,” she says. She’s talking so quietly I have to lean in close to hear her.

  “What?”

  “I was scared of monsters.” She’s staring straight ahead, at the stream of water, the rocks.

  “What monsters?”

  “People. Evil people.”

  “Is that what Mama said?” I’m talking louder now, too loud. I’m excited. I can’t help myself. Finally, something.

  “Evil gets inside them,” she says, her tone gone flat like when she’s reciting. This is what I want. This is what I went out into the church of the wilderness, the quiet, to hear. Mama’s words. Mama speaking to me, through her. “It sneaks in under their fingernails. If you look at their eyes you can see it. If they touch you it will go inside you. If you see someone you run.”

  I recognize the last part. Lee said it before, back at Brandon’s clearing. I think maybe she’ll run again, like she did that time. I’m bracing myself to catch the water jug. But she doesn’t. I’ve broken through to something. She’s gone very still, stopped shaking.

  “If they ever catch you,” she says, and now I’m the one nearly shaking. This is what I wanted. “If they ever get you. If they ever try to touch you.” She turns to look at me, stricken, her eyes darting back and forth between mine. She looks terrified. “Kill them.”

  She does drop the water jug, then, and runs. I dive for the jug, manage to grab it before too much spills. I let the sediment settle for a moment, let my racing heart settle, take a sip.

  It’s what I wanted. Mama’s words. But I’m not sure I’m happy. I feel sort of sick. Evil gets inside them.

  I think Mama was really messed up. And she messed up Lee, too. I don’t know.

  Here I am, trying to be Mama. Trying to follow in her footsteps.

  But maybe Mama was wrong about more than just me. The people in town were wrong to judge her, it’s true, but she pushed everyone away. Even Brandon, in the end. Even her own daughters. Both of them.

  You can’t live totally alone. You need somebody. Not everybody is evil. That was just her fears talking. Right?

  I walk off in the direction Lee ran, calling her name. I’d howl, but my throat is scratchy from breathing the cold night air and crying so much over the last couple of days.

  I’m worried maybe she’s run off so far that we won’t be able to find each other. I’m not sure I’ll be able to find my way back to camp without her. And I don’t know how she’d manage alone out here. These aren’t her woods. She doesn’t have all her traps, all her hideouts, all her little stores. She doesn’t have Brandon.

  She finds me, though, after a while, runs up. She doesn’t say anything about what happened. I offer her the water jug and she chugs about half of it.

  “I guess we can go get more later,” I say. I take the jug from her, twist the cap back on. I hesitate. “Mama was wrong,” I say softly. “You know that, right?”

  In answer, Lee picks up a small handful of leaves. She tosses them at me and darts off. She’s trying to get me to chase her, to play, but I don’t feel like running.

  “We should go back to the camp,” I shout at her. She trudges back toward me, sweeps past, clearly disappointed. I follow her.

  I don’t want to leave Savannah on her own for too long. I’m worried about her, too. I’m worried she wants to leave, worried she’ll sneak away again when I’m not watching and never come back. Maybe it was wrong of me to bring us into the woods. Maybe we should find a motel or something. The money wouldn’t last long, maybe a night or two, but at least Savannah would be happy.

  Maybe we just need to go to another Walmart, stock up more thoroughly. Get that air mattress, that portable charger. Ease into this lifestyle. Do it right.

  It takes me longer than it should to realize that my sister isn’t leading me back to camp. Or if she is, she’s taking a strange and circuitous route. We pass by a rocky outcropping that I swear I don’t recognize, down into a small valley that rings no bells either.

  She’s following a sort of path, I realize suddenly. Not a wide path, not a human path. But a narrow and inconsistent line of tamped earth and crushed weeds. A deer trail.

  I grab Lee’s arm.

  “We can track deer later,” I tell her. “We need to get back to camp, okay? We need to get back to Savannah.”

  She frowns, but makes a sharp turn, away from the deer trail. I curse myself for not paying more attention on the way to the water source, not paying more attention now.

  Ahead of me, Lee suddenly freezes. She turns her head one way and then the other. She sniffs the air like a damn dog or something and I laugh.

  She waves a frantic hand at me, telling me to shut up.

  “What?” I whisper. I don’t hear anything or see anything.

  In response, she grabs my hand firmly in hers, turns us around in the opposite direction. She walks quickly, half dragging me behind her.

  “What’s going on?” I say, panicking a little.

  We seem to be backtracking. I see the rocky outcropping up ahead. Lee hesitates and then pulls me around the other side of it, hugging the rock.

  We round the outcropping, and there, about ten feet ahead, facing us, is a man.

  We freeze.

  So does he.

  He’s older than us, older than Jack, I think, but not too old, maybe mid-twenties, his cheeks covered in stubble. His jeans are streaked with rust, the sleeves of his brown jacket stained with what I assume is grease. He looks every bit as shocked to see us as we are to see him.

  “Hey,” he says, after a moment. “You girls know Savannah?”

  “No,” I say, and I realize this is Clayton. It must be. The man I saw through the trees. He’s coming to find Savannah. He’s going to take her away. He’s going to steal her away from me.

  “Maybe you’ve seen her?” He holds a hand out in front of his chest, indicating height. “Kind of short. Brown hair. Seventeen.”

  “No,” I say again. Seventeen?

  “She’s camping with her family.” Clayton frowns, eyes darting back and forth between us. “You two out here all alone?”

  “No,” I say. My sister squeezes my hand.

  “Okay,” he says, still frowning. His eyes linger on my sister, taking in the torn tights, the matted hair, the scratched legs. I take a half step sideways, trying to shield her from his view. Maybe he’ll tell his uncle about the strange girls he saw. Maybe his uncle will have heard something already. News bulletin. Amber Alert.

  Maybe Clayton will force the truth out of Savannah next time he sees her. Maybe he’ll look at her like she’s the only girl in the world and she won’t be able to resist.

  “Well,” says Clayton, “if you do see her, tell her I’m looking for her. Tell her I meant what I said.”

  He turns off the path, takes a few steps, planning to go around us, I guess, to keep looking. What did he say to her? You’re the only girl in the world. Run away with me.

  I can’t let that happen.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” I say.

  Clayton stops. Turns. “What?”

  “She never wants to see you again.”

  “I thought you didn’t know her.”

  “She hates you,” I say. I hate you, I should say. You’re trying to steal her. You’ve barely known her for a full day, but I’ve known her nearly all my life. She’s mine. You’re ruining everything.

  He scowls. “Who are you?”

  My sister squeezes my hand harder. I squeeze back.

  “And she’s only fifteen,” I say, thinking of Jack. Thinking of what he and Savannah did. There’s no way nothing happened last night. “So you’re probably going straight to jail.”

  Clayton’s expression darkens. He takes a step toward me.

  My sister’s hand slips out of mine.

>   She lunges forward, closes the short distance between us.

  Clayton barely has time to react. My sister barrels into him with all her strength. She knocks him to the ground. Knocks him right over. My sister. Doing what I’d love to do, but would never dare. My perfect sister.

  The man is on his back and she is pinning him down, straddling him, her dress bunching up around her hips, and I have seen this before, except her dress was blue then and now it’s green and black, like the night sky seen through the leaves.

  Her hands are on the man’s neck. He didn’t hit his head, though. He’s moving. He’s flailing his arms, kicking his legs. He’s making a fist. No no no.

  The man punches my sister in the shoulder and she screams, but she doesn’t let go. Her hands are twisted into his shirt. He is twice her size, but she’s holding on tight. He slams a fist into her side. I’m paralyzed, afraid to move, watching.

  My sister’s face is down by the man’s neck. His hands are closing around her throat.

  I have seen this before.

  I drop the water jug and run forward. The same way I did on Crybaby Bridge. I throw myself down, just fall really, let the weight of my body drop heavy on the man’s right arm, ripping it away from my sister, pinning it to the ground with my hip. A bruising pain. The man struggles, shouts, and I reach out to grab his left arm with both of mine, tug it toward me with every ounce of strength I have.

  He’s shouting something, but I can’t hear it. There’s blood rushing in my ears. A river. There’s blood.

  My sister’s face is against the man’s neck, nuzzling like a lover. His right arm writhes beneath me like a snake. His other arm wrenches free of my grasp. It flails wildly, hits my sister.

  She yanks her head up and back, hard.

  More blood.

  There’s something in my sister’s mouth, held between her teeth. A scrap of skin. She spits it out and bites the man again, her teeth scraping his neck, catching a roll of flesh, snapping shut, hard.

  The man bucks suddenly, screaming with rage, and manages to throw us both off. I roll. He’s up and he’s running. There are drops of blood shaking off him like rain.

  There is a river in my ears. A far-off ache somewhere in my body. I push myself up.

  He stumbles, drops to his knees. Both his hands are around his own neck. Trying to hold himself together.

  My sister’s cheek is swelling already, one eye squished shut. Her lips and chin are dripping and bright, her teeth bared, in grimace or grin I can’t say. Her teeth are oil-slicked red. She’s breathing hard, her ribs pumping like wings. She’s making a huffing, grunting sound. There are fresh scratches across her clavicles, the insides of her elbows. She holds one arm away from her, bent gently, suspended carefully in the air.

  She coughs, spits blood.

  I open my mouth to ask if she’s okay, but no sound comes out.

  The man has fallen down. I don’t know if I should help him or if we should run. I crawl toward him with no plan, stop a few feet away.

  There is blood pooling around him, spreading slowly through the dirt like an egg cracked into flour for pancakes.

  “Clayton?” I ask.

  I reach out and nudge his shoulder. A rivulet of blood reaches my knee and soaks into my jeans.

  I pull Clayton’s right arm toward me, press my shaking fingers against his wrist, searching for a pulse. I press harder. Harder. Press hard enough that it would hurt him if he was in any position to be hurt.

  But he is not.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  My sister’s right arm might be broken, though I hope it’s only sprained. Either way, it hurts badly enough that she won’t use it. She pulls with her left arm only. I pull with both arms, but my sister’s arms are probably stronger than mine anyway, so maybe it evens out.

  “We saw a deer,” I tell her, thinking of what Savannah said yesterday. Goddammit, Jo, you really are the biggest liar in the whole world.

  The body is heavy. I’ve got ahold of one wrist, my sister the other. I try not to look at it, the way the legs slither through the dirt, how the head nods up and down, bumping over rocks and swollen roots.

  “We were chasing the deer,” I say, “or you were chasing it, I guess, and I was chasing you, and we fell. We tumbled over the cliff, like the pastor did, remember?”

  My sister makes a small keening noise. The wrist she’s holding slips out of her grip, flops to the ground. I stop and glance back. We’re leaving a trail. Faint red streaks here and there on the leaves. My sister gets a grip on the wrist again and we keep pulling.

  “That cliff back there,” I say. “We fell off that cliff. You fell on your arm, smashed your face on a rock. Okay?”

  “Okay,” my sister says.

  “We won’t tell Savannah. We can’t.”

  “Don’t you ever tell a soul,” says my sister.

  I stop, suddenly. I thought I heard something. A voice. Far away. Calling my name.

  “Did you hear that?” I ask my sister, but a moment later I hear it again and I’m sure. It’s Savannah. Calling for me.

  “Get down,” I say. I crouch and quickly lower myself until I’m down on my belly, flat as the body. My sister lowers herself too, but slower, her movements awkward, hampered by her arm.

  Jo?

  I hold very still, hardly daring to breathe. I remember hearing my name in the forest two nights ago, remember fearing that sound, hiding in the darkness as strangers hunted me. But now it’s Savannah I’m hiding from. Even she’s a danger to us now. A threat. Everyone is. One by one they have all become strangers, monsters, unfamiliar shapes in the dark.

  Jo?

  My cheek is pressed into the dirt. Her voice sounds like it’s moving farther away. I could get up. I could run after her, I could keep running, right back into that other world. That bright world, so warm and so light and so easy.

  I lift my head and for a moment I think I see her, far off, moving through the trees. But then she’s gone. The window to that other world is shut. Latched. I can never go back.

  “Let’s hurry,” I say to my sister. I help her up from the ground, get a grip on the body again, keep moving.

  We’ve barely gone another hundred feet when my sister whines, tries to stop. I ignore her and keep dragging. The body’s jacket catches on a fallen branch. I tug until it rips loose.

  “Stop,” my sister pleads, and when I ignore her: “Can we stop?”

  “No,” I tell her. When we started I had no plan beyond moving the body farther from our camp, farther from Savannah, but it wasn’t long before I realized that we need to do better. We need to hide it.

  We can’t bury it. We don’t have a shovel. The ground here is hard. We can’t burn it. The smoke, the smell. A lake? If we had one of those I’d be happy for lots of reasons.

  I make my sister keep walking. Let her suffer. The sun moves across the sky, disappears behind clouds. The body is no longer bleeding. It is pale, bloodless. I’m not sorry. Evil gets in under the fingernails. We did what we had to do.

  It isn’t fair. Why should we have to hide it? He upset Savannah. Something must have happened between them. Maybe he hurt her. And he hit my sister too hard. He deserved to die. Right?

  That gives me an idea.

  I let my sister rest a few times, but never for long. She makes no attempt to abandon me. She knows we are in this together. We’ve been playing a game, I think, all three of us. Pretending that we were just friends on an adventure, just three normal girls. Pretending we were all the same.

  Or maybe I was the only one pretending. Pretending that I didn’t have to leave the other world all the way behind. Pretending I could still have it both ways, both worlds. My sister and Savannah. Night and day.

  I can’t have both. I have to choose.

  Savannah isn’t cut out for this.
She never was. Maybe when we were kids, we could all have gotten along, but she’s too different now. She’s too much a part of the other world.

  I’ll let her go. She can take the car, say I was the one who stole it. I’ll tell her, when we get back. When we’ve washed the blood off. Go, I’ll tell her. Maybe she’ll argue, but I know, deep down, that she wants to leave. She probably misses her mother, her sisters. Misses all the boys back in town, those lottery tickets she keeps scratching, week after week, sure each time that this is the one, this is the winner—and when there is no jackpot, no payout, well, the next one, she’s sure. That’ll be the one.

  I will let her go.

  No, I will make her go. Drive her away if that’s what I have to do. I’ve made my choice. I know where I belong, what world I belong to.

  Wrong or not, Mama is in my blood.

  I have no real sense of direction to guide me. Even my sister doesn’t know these woods, so it’s no use asking her. But finally, up ahead, I see a break in the trees.

  The road.

  * * *

  —

  My sister and I crouch side by side, staring down the hillside at the empty road below us. Behind us in the dirt is the body of a man we never met before today. My back and arms ache from dragging him here. My sister’s right eye is swollen shut.

  The sun is hiding from what it’s seen. The air feels tight, like maybe it will rain soon. It would be a blessing if it did. That trail we left on the leaves. I hope it rains hard.

  My sister makes her small keening noise again.

  “Just wait,” I tell her.

  We’ll move our camp. Move deeper into the woods, farther from the road. Maybe we’ll build ourselves a shelter high up in the trees, with floors and walls woven from branches and leaves. Deep in the woods. So deep no one will ever find us.